That means one child under 13 died of suicide nearly every five days, on average, over those 17 years.

The frequency was higher from 2013 to 2015 -- once every 3.4 days -- thanks mostly to a 54% spike in the suicides of 11- and 12-year-olds compared to the three years prior. That jibes with the CDC's announcement of a recent rise in suicide rates in ages 10-14.

Still, some perspective: Suicides before the teen yearsare infrequent compared to other groups.

There were 0.31 suicides per 100,000 children ages 5-12 during those 17 years. Compare that to 7.04 suicides per 100,000 people ages 13-18, or 17.39 per 100,000 for ages 18 to 65.

Child suicide rates rise with age. But, yes, the CDC has recorded suicides of 5-, 6- and 7-year-olds. From 1999 to 2015 (the most recent year for data), those numbers were two, four and eight, respectively.

REMNANT COMMENT: This is distressing beyond words. What is happening to us? We're increasingly violent towards one another. We're losing any sense of goodness and decency. We hurt kids. We hurt ourselves. We hate God.

The family—the basic unit of society—is in more evident collapse today than perhaps at any other time in human history. It is broken seemingly beyond repair.

So with God banished, morality branded ‘hate speech’ and families largely dysfunctional, we "enlightened ones" are fast becoming the most benighted people in history. Even our children can no longer stand the darkness of our Enlightenment.

And we're so terribly good at Death. We exterminate millions in the womb. We've developed bigger and better killing machines that can slaughter untold numbers in far off lands with the push of a button. We’re expert at ‘taking people out’—whether it be babies, the crippled, the elderly. You name it, we're history's most proficient executioner.

And now that we've told God to go to Hell and messed up the family beyond recognition, even our little kids want out.

I wonder if there has ever been a time in human history when little children were taking their lives at the rate ours are today. Historians are not shy about trying to "gross us out" with the sordid details of pagan Rome’s depravity; and yet I don't remember reading anything about measurable suicide rates among 10-year-olds in old Rome. I have a feeling we may hold the record on that, just as we hold that of the number of babies slaughtered by their own moms.

And the worst of it is that we're so dumbed down we don't even know how mind-numbingly stupid we are. We still think we’re "progressive", despite a mountain of evidence to suggest the opposite: that—socially, morally, humanly speaking—we’re the most backward, backwater hicks in history. To call us “pagans” would be to insult the pagans, who certainly had religion, believed in a god, and revered marriage and the family. History’s average pagan was a daily communicant compared to what we've become today. Don't believe me? Turn on the news tonight.

We have no God. We have no history we care to study. We have no stories to tell our children. We have no dreams. We're angry, fat, selfish, murderous and now suicidal.

And yet we still imagine ourselves to have evolved. We've moved beyond the Dark Ages of Faith. We know what is good and what is evil — like those Confederate gentlemen whose statues we’re tearing down. We sit in judgment of them because we occupy the moral high ground. Why shouldn’t we be history’s judge and jury? We have Google, digital porn, Snapchat and Twitter!

Life if better now than ever before, and people are happier now than they ever were. Just ask one of those little kids... before he commits suicide.

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Michael Matt has been an editor of The Remnant since 1990. Since 1994, he has been the newspaper's editor. A graduate of Christendom College, Michael Matt has written hundreds of articles on the state of the Church and the modern world. He is the host of The Remnant Underground and Remnant TV's The Remnant Forum. He's been U.S. Coordinator for Notre Dame de Chrétienté in Paris--the organization responsible for the Pentecost Pilgrimage to Chartres, France--since 2000. Mr. Matt has led the U.S. contingent on the Pilgrimage to Chartres for the last 24 years. He is a lecturer for the Roman Forum's Summer Symposium in Gardone Riviera, Italy. He is the author of Christian Fables, Legends of Christmas and Gods of Wasteland (Fifty Years of Rock ‘n’ Roll)and regularly delivers addresses and conferences to Catholic groups about the Mass, home-schooling, and the culture question. Together with his wife, Carol Lynn and their seven children, Mr. Matt currently resides in St. Paul, Minnesota.